There is tons of info on how to control a camera with an Arduino. But I'm wanting to use a Lanc based remote control to control an Arduino.

I want to take a Lanc Zoom Controller and have it send commands to an Arduino. But I think my problem is with the emulating a video camera so the Lanc Zoom Controller will sync with the Arduino and send it's commands. The communication is a 8 bit serial over one line. I'm creating a pulse to send binary to the remote, and listening for a binary response. The first two bytes are commands from the lanc remote, the next two are not used, then the next four are a response from the camera with recording info, or timecode....

Right now I can tell that the remote control isn't getting the pulse correctly. The controller has a red LED on it. It blinks when it has power and no sync. When the controller is plugged into a camera the Led is off. I use the same wiring build to send recored and zoom commands to a video camera with no problems.

Thanks for any help or thoughts. I'm new to a lot of this.dan.

Here one of the main sites that I'm getting most of my info from:http://controlyourcamera.blogspot.com/2011/02/arduino-controlled-video-recording-over.html

I'm using this build

And here is a extremely simplified version of my code. For right now I'm trying to emulate the basics of a video camera.

Serial.begin(9600); //open the serial port pinMode(lancPin, INPUT); //listens to the LANC line pinMode(cmdPin, OUTPUT); //writes to the LANC line pinMode(recButton, INPUT); //start-stop recording button digitalWrite(cmdPin, HIGH); bitDuration = bitDuration - 8; //Writing to the digital port takes about 8 microseconds so only 96 microseconds are left till the end of each bit

1. I think the problem is that the circuit and code you copied emulates a Lanc controller, and you want to emulate a video camera. So the code needs to wait for a command from the controller, and send a suitable response.

2. The interface circuitry is more complicated than necessary. All that is needed is one I/O pin with the 4K7 pullup to +5V and a 100 ohm series resistor to Lanc signal. The open-collector output can be emulated by switching the pin mode (or data direction register) to Output to send a Low, and Input to send a High.

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DC42 - That worked perfect! I was able to build out my code to emulate a video camera. I'm printing out the commands from the lanc controller like a champ. It's great how simple the circuit works using a single line! Thanks a million for the help!

I do have another question for any one though: I'm storing the binary response in an array. But I'm new to arduino sketch / C++. How do I dump my array into a long string or one 8 bit integer? I have done a lot of searching. But maybe I'm not searching the right terms.